In the Walled Gardens (2 page)

I stood by a column, at right angles to her. She looked out with an expression of alarm, even dread, as if gripped by something
terrible. Knowledge, premonition?

“What an afternoon!” the caretaker said next to her.

“Inauspicious,” she said, barely audible.

Then she picked up her shoes and headed for the gate. I followed her, her feet weaving past puddles until she put on her shoes
by the gate. She crossed by the grocery store, got into a car in the side street, lit a cigarette behind the wheel, and just
sat there smoking. Her windows fogged up. I’d heard she had a wealthy husband and two children. I stood waiting for my friends,
the last to leave.

Evening fell with the streets washed down, the pavement glistening like coal. Summer was finally over.

I
GOT IN BEHIND
the wheel and threw my heels in the back and lit a cigarette. I could have sworn a man was watching me from the other side
of the street. Now I was getting paranoid. Whoever it was got into the backseat of a navy blue Peykan that swerved down Pahlavi.
I rolled down the window, dragged on the cigarette, fretted with the gold lighter Houshang had given me. My husband always
gives me expensive presents when he gets back from abroad. He thinks I suspect nothing as long as I enact the role he’s deemed
suitable for me and let him conduct life as he pleases. I count his failings like darts on a board.

Bagh Ferdaus. What a name, Garden of Paradise. Grandeur and peace. Perfect for an afternoon concert. The green lawns freshly
cut, fragrant, with folding chairs in a semicircle. The event televised and well attended. Music rising to gray skies, the
afternoon warm, oppressive. It was too late in the summer really for wearing yellow; I should have worn something else. Yellow
looked jarring under gray skies and hail. Yellow was definitely out of place.

I shook hands with them after the concert. They were so matter-of-fact that anyone watching would have thought we were discussing
music instead of dismal information. I had mentioned the private matter to them at a luncheon two weeks before, telling neither
Houshang nor Father. Father hasn’t much influence left and Houshang only uses his for business. He doesn’t like to get involved
in matters of conscience. So there we were, the three of us on the lawns, cordial and diffident. What a place for a conversation
about the secret police, in the Garden of Paradise. But bad taste reigns these days. They’re always cordial at first because
of Father. “And how’s Mr. Mosharraf? Please give him my very best.” Why don’t they do it in person? Father isn’t fashionable
to call on any-more; he’s one of the has-beens they’ve shelved. How did they put it after that? Succinctly. “That’s all they’ll
say. Don’t ask more questions.” Why not? A country without questions is a land of indifference. They don’t even hear the questions.

I rolled down the window for more air. What could I tell Mr. Bashirian? Your son’s in Komiteh Prison. They reserve the right
to keep the boy, the right to detain him without a defense lawyer, a trial. The right to imprison him, burying him in a cell.
His mother died years ago when he was a child. His father wants to leap to the ends of the earth to get him. He wept when
he told me, put his face in his hands and wept. To my shame, I sat watching him woodenly. He’s just a student. What do they
think he’ll do? Blow up the army base at Doshan Tappeh, gun down a general? They’re paranoid, shrouded in secrecy and hunting
shadows. It’s their own shadow they should be afraid of.

Dusk at the foot of mountains. I felt them pressing in, looming. We were invited to an embassy dinner and I’d be late. I sat
in the car, watching people going in and out of the grocer’s. Pedestrians buying provisions for dinner, children dragged along
by flustered parents into backstreets. I thought of my two sons, sheltered. ...I stayed in the car, waiting. The streetlights
came on and I felt the ground being swept away from under me. Music, grandeur, assurance, composure, all gone. There was
nothing to hold on to.

The hailstorm, like an omen, beating down suddenly. Standing there under the pavilion, I felt the premonition. Looking up
at the sky, I saw it huddled, livid, and knew we’d all have to pay.

G
UESTS CIRCULATED THROUGH
enormous rooms. Hors d’oeuvres were being passed around, but by the looks of it there weren’t many left. Dinner would be
announced at any moment. Houshang loved to make an entrance, his pretty face suffused with a sudden flush for being invited,
for being permitted to keep such company. They love him, he’s charming and sociable, he’s good for business. But he was very
annoyed with me for being late.

They had rounded up the usual bunch, and the powerful were holding court. Mrs. Sahafchi, the wife of the wealthiest man in
the capital, and her pampered daughter reigned in Saint Laurent like most every other woman in the room. Tiny waistcoats and
ballooning sleeves and bright skirts in taffeta with cummerbunds. Tribal costumes at the embassy? The West sells back Eastern
ideas to us at one thousand times the price. It’s not our ideas we like so much as their labels. Wives exhaust their husbands’
bank accounts around their necks and ears and wrists and fingers. I felt the twinge, not of envy, but of regret. We’ve turned
into the handmaidens of opulence.

Embassy parties are dull. We’re on the B-plus list, though Houshang wants to make the A list the fastest way possible. He
knows how. I think these parties are held so foreigners can gather information. They’re really here for oil and gas and coal
and minerals and strategic points. To secure border stations to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union. To sell arms and fighter jets
and bring in the giant tentacles of their conglomerates. They need to boost their sagging economies, all the while gathering
statistics. That way they get to lecture us.

Thierry Dalembert, a French banker, threw his arms out before me.
“Ma-has-tee!”
he exclaimed with admiration, embracing me. He wanted gossip about Mrs. Sahafchi’s daughter, whispering about how long it
would take him to seduce her. I told him he didn’t stand a chance. They were keeping her on ice.

His blue eyes glistened. “Who’s the lucky man?”

“He’s being perfected by God!”

He laughed, exhilarated, quite certain he was nearly perfect himself.

“You look bored,” he said craftily.

He seized the last two glasses of champagne from a passing silver tray and offered me one. The embassy, known for stinginess,
was splurging. They were drumming up business. These were intoxicating times.

“What’s new?” Thierry said.

“I could ask you the same.”

“Houshang wants this port like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Thierry wanted gossip about the Bandar Kangan project on the Gulf. He hadn’t managed to talk to Houshang yet. There are major
projects worth billions of dollars coming up along the Persian Gulf. The commercial port on the island of Gheshm, the naval
port at Chah-Bahar, the expansion of Bandar Abbas. But recently we’ve had sudden government cutbacks in expenditures, with
grand projects like my husband’s new port teetering in the balance. Houshang’s company, in a joint venture with a British
firm, is the general contractor for Bandar Kangan, an expensive port by the old coastal town of Kangan, with its dusty palms
and fishing boats and distinctive architecture, three hundred miles from the port of Bushehr. But will it ever get finished?
Houshang dismisses such questions. Kangan is a dream project. “The navy wants it!” he keeps saying. Like Houshang, the military
always gets what it wants.

Thierry was courting us. We were his designated couple from the in crowd, always invited to his elegant dinner parties at
his home in Sa‘adabad. He wants us to meet his big boss from Paris, due to arrive in Tehran a little before the official state
visit of the president of France. I’ve heard Thierry and Houshang chuckling about Paris. Maybe he wants to wine and dine my
husband there, taking him to the best nightclubs so he can whisper about business in Iran, lucrative contracts, insider favors,
kickbacks to an account in Zurich. He could even foot the bill for the most exclusive call girls of Europe. Not that my husband
needs help there. Everyone watches a man for his weaknesses.

Thierry offered me a cigarette. He’d turned sullen. He dislikes women who don’t talk, who don’t shed words like clothing,
and leave him in the dark. I smiled when I realized how he could prove useful to me.

Houshang was deep in conversation with the ambassador and two ponderous men. Things were going swimmingly, I could tell. We’d
make the A list any day now; Houshang can’t think of anything better.

We were called in to dinner.

I took Thierry’s arm and whispered, “Be patient.”

He beamed, thinking his charisma had overcome yet another obstacle. He would boast to his compatriots about seducing the exotic
locals. Exotic was everything distant that they didn’t understand, nor ever really planned to. But he possessed worldly charms
and wit and a magnificent education. They’d sent us their very best. I like him.

The problem with most foreign men is that they’re too blond and too rapacious. They think they can rule the world. Dollars
and francs and pounds and marks bobbing in their eyes instead of pupils.

T
HE ROADS WERE DARK
and quiet all the way to Darrous. Houshang drove fast, not completely sober.

We’d stopped off at the Key Club after the embassy with the group from London. “It’s important to impress them,” Houshang
whispered to me after dinner. “They’re already impressed!” I said. “Especially by all the money they stand to make.” But Houshang
wasn’t listening.

He cosseted them at the club, plying them with drinks and flamboyant attention. He danced and talked to their wives as if
they were promising starlets and he the great director. And the wives giggled, fugitives from the confines of their dull European
lives and the doldrums of marriage. Houshang introduced them to his good buddies, squished together at adjacent tables, who
more than obliged, laughing the night away with them, all hung up about foreign blond women. Their husbands — anchored to
their Greco-Latin pedestals — pulling loose their ties in dark corners, ogled Eastern women ten times more alluring than their
wives, dreaming of how to satisfy their whims in exotic places and run back to Europe.

It’s so nice to have a country everyone loves coming to. You’d think we’re adored! You’d think we’re the center of the world.

The house was dark, only a light on in the hall upstairs. I looked in on the children. Rumpled hair, fluttered breaths, pudgy
cheeks on pillows. My sons, sovereign in my heart. In our bedroom we went about undressing without conversation. These days
we feel more compelled to talk to others. We don’t even regret it. I wanted to read and Houshang wanted to sleep. After thirteen
years, if nothing else, we have our habits.

“We were late for the embassy,” he said irritably.

“How’s the port coming along?”

“I’m proud of my efforts. They’ve finally paid off.”

“Your port is going to destroy the town of Kangan.”

“It’s going to drag that sleepy old place into the twentieth century!”

“Thierry didn’t get a chance to talk to you tonight.”

“The leech wants introductions! Let him learn to suck up properly.”

I was tempted to tell Houshang about Mr. Bashirian’s son, stashed away in some dark cell at Komiteh Prison. I wanted him to
suck up to a rear admiral or one of his influential contacts and ask them to look into the matter. But he wasn’t going to
make waves, now or ever.

“Mahastee,” he said in bed, before turning over, “I want to tell you something.”

I thought he meant about intimacy, affection, our life together. How we’d grown apart that year. We hadn’t been close in months;
I wouldn’t let him touch me. I began to consider how much to forgive him.

His head hit the pillow. “Forget all that intellectual bullshit you go in for. This is no time for anything to go wrong for
me. Understand?”

Houshang can be uncannily prescient.

I walked down the hallway to the upstairs study, pulled up a book, but never turned on the light. I left the book on my lap
and lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark. The prospect of boredom together was lifting. Houshang and I were developing an
appetite for war. He’d turned out like the rest of them, taking the smallest unexpected idea as an absolute attack on all
conventions. The dictates of his ambition clouded his vision, requiring you to agree with him wholesale. Otherwise you were
intellectual, which meant you’d succumbed, subscribing to and awash in some suspicious ideology. A dissident, according to
such irrational rules, before you even knew it yourself.

I
WOKE UP
at five-thirty as usual. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the birds were singing under the roof. At that hour I’m especially thankful
I’m a bachelor and live alone and I have peace and quiet. I closed the window, the one facing the back alley, then washed
and shaved and set my bedroll against the wall.

I made tea, not on the samovar but on the kettle crowned by the teapot with pink roses Mother gave me. We bought it in Lalehzar,
with all my dishes and cups and saucers. I said, “Mother, why get me a teapot with roses?” She said, “That’s all they sell
and this is the country of the rose and nightingale.” Father adored her until the day he died. I think he still adores her
beyond the grave. She knows it — I see it in her eyes.

I had hot tea and rolled up pieces of bread with feta cheese for breakfast. I listened to the radio, reread between mouthfuls
the revised statement of purpose for our underground group at the end of the month. I edited and scrawled in the margins,
expounding on our main themes — the right of self-expression, the dignity of democratic freedoms, political pluralism. I inserted
sentences here and there to underscore our purpose — how we intellectuals of the Left want to liberate the present from the
past once and for all. We want to see the collapse of this dictatorship, a world of endless decrees, obsolete political patterns,
and paternalistic interventions. We want a constitutional democracy with independent0 political institutions. And a parliament
and political parties elected and willed by the people and representing them, instead of authoritarian royal directives and
rigged elections. We want to stir up the masses by giving them a political education and objective. We believe that imperialism
— the age-old adversary and economic exploiter of the Third World — is wheedling and coercing this regime, its willing servant,
to keep us beholden and dependent. And that capitalism, with its cunning distortions and ferocious bravado, is working its
ways to repress the inevitable — class warfare. We want to show how this regime’s power is primarily bluster. Its show of
strength, vast resources, machinery of state, pitted against our determination and our tenaciousness.